Kenzaburo Oe - Somersault

This decided, Kizu saw Ikuo out. This young man, he mused, might very well have already had the idea of posing in mind before he came to visit.

Still, Kizu found the same sort of faint smile he had outside the drying room once again rising to his lips.

That weekend Kizu woke up while it was still dark out. He noticed some- thing about the way he held his body in bed. Probably because he felt the cancer had spread to his liver, these days he always slept with his left elbow as a pil- low. It was a position based on a distant memory, a memory of himself at sev- enteen or eighteen, in the valley in the forest where he was born and raised, lying on the slope of a low hill. Sometimes this vision of himself appeared in dreams as a richly colored reality, Kizu seeing this as his own figure in the eternal present. And in the predawn darkness, in a dream just before waking, he returned to his eternal present body.

Kizu was at the point where his hair, to use the American expression, was salt and pepper, yet his mental image of himself was always that of this seventeen- or eighteen-year-old. Emotionally, he knew he hadn't changed much from his teen years. He was aware, quite graphically, of a grotesque disjuncture within him, a man with an over-fifty-year-old body attached to the emotions of a teenager. Kizu recalled the thirteenth canto of Dante's Inferno, the scene in which a soul on the threshold of old age picks up its own body as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old and hangs it from some brambles.

Beginning a week later, Ikuo began posing to help Kizu with a series of tab- leaus he'd only vaguely conceived. As he drew, Kizu, influenced by what Ikuo had said that first day, lectured as he used to do in classrooms-though of course in American universities if a professor did all the talking he'd receive a terrible evaluation from the students at the end of the semester. Sometimes Kizu would respond promptly to the questions Ikuo asked as he posed; other times he gave himself until the following week to answer. Kizu recalled in particular one question from early in their sessions.

"Last time," Kizu said, "you asked me what it means for a person to be free. I think I struggled with the same question when I was young. So I gave it some thought. An anecdote I once read about a painter came to mind.

"In order to give you an idea of how I understand it, I need to give you another example, not from some book I read but a quote I heard from a col- league of mine who teaches philosophy, which is: A circle in nature and the concept of a circle within God are the same, they just manifest themselves differently.

"The anecdote took place during the Renaissance, when an official in charge of choosing an artist to paint a mammoth fresco requested one par- ticular artist (an artist I was quite taken with when I was young) to submit a work that best displayed his talents. The response of the artist-which be- came famous-was to submit a single circle he had drawn.

An artist draws a circle with a pencil. And that circle fits perfectly with the concept of a circle that resides within God. The person who can accom- plish this is a free man. In order to arrive at that state of freedom, he has had to polish his artistry through countless paintings. It was as if my own life work 1 had dreamed about was contained in this. When I was young, I mean."

Ikuo continued to hold his pose, gazing at the space in front of him, lis- tening attentively, his expression unchanged, his rugged features reminding Kizu of Blake's portrait of a youthful Los, likened to the sun-Kizu feeling he was brushing away with his crayon the shadows of Blake's colored block prints that shaded Ikuo's nude body.

Ikuo was silent until their next break. "I've been thinking about some- thing very similar to what you said, Professor. People say young children are free. Okay, but if you get even a little self-conscious you can't act freely, even though you might have been able to a few years before. When I was no longer a child, I fantasized about a freedom I could attain. And not just talking about it like this, either… "I've been thinking about Jonah, too. He tried to run away from God but couldn't. He learned this the hard way, almost dying in the process. Made me think how much the inside of a whale's stomach must stink!" Kizu couldn't keep from smiling faintly.

"Finally he gave up and decided to follow God's orders. Once he made that decision he stuck to his guns. Jonah complained to God that he'd changed his original plan. Aren't you supposed to finish what you first decided to do? he implored. Isn't the way Jonah acted exactly the way a free person is sup- posed to act? Of course it's God who makes this freedom possible-and cor- rect me if I'm wrong-but if God doesn't take into account the freedom to object to what He wants, how can He know what true unlimited freedom is?

That's why I'd like to read what happens next in the book ol Jonah."

Instead of a reply, a faint smile on Kizu's face showed he understood what the young man meant.

It was the beginning of autumn in Tokyo. Near the faculty housing where Kizu had lived in New Jersey, there was a so-called lake, actually a long muddy creek used for rowing practice, and every year as autumn arrived he used to hear from the far shore of the lake a cicadalike call; his African room- mate, an art history major, insisted it was a bird. Now in his Tokyo apart- ment he could see a mammoth nire tree that stood about five yards from his south-facing terrace. The soft broad rounded leaves reminded him of the stand of trees that lined the campus grounds back in New Jersey; he guessed it was a type of elm. He didn't stop to think that elms in Japan are, indeed, classi- fied as nire. The first time Ikuo had removed all his clothes to pose nude, he looked off at the far-off buildings through the leafy branches of the tree and remarked, "That amadamo screens us well here, though it won't after the leaves fall."

"Akadamo? "

"That's the name I heard it called when I was wandering around Hokkaido," Ikuo replied. "Most people call it a harunire-a wych elm-but it's different. I imagine it'll be blossoming soon. You can tell it from a wych elm by when it blooms, according to what my father told me…"

Ikuo's face, reminding Kizu of a carnivore's snout, was soon lost in rev- erie; Kizu too was lost in thought. Ikuo hadn't had any contact with his fam- ily in a long time and had never said anything about the home he grew up in.

His face was so unusual that Kizu felt sure Ikuo must have had a comical appeal when he was a boy and been a favorite in his family. After he grew up and began wandering in Hokkaido and elsewhere around the country, his family surely must have felt a profound sense of loss.

The wych elm near his terrace began to take on erotic connotations for Kizu. One morning, his gaze was drawn to the lush foliage of the tree, for it was swaying and shaking with unusual force. Soon he saw a pair of squirrels leaping about on a bare branch, disappearing in the shadows, their power concentrated in the base of their thick tails. Kizu could sense that the squir- rels were preoccupied with mating, and as their movements made the leaves shake exaggeratedly he felt familiar stirrings deep in his loins. Kizu could imagine, in the deep green shadows of the tree, Ikuo's slim waist, the muscles of his butt underneath the tough outer layer of skin softly expanding and contracting. For the first time in quite a while, Kizu's penis grew almost pain- fully erect.

As Kizu watched, the swelling peacefully subsided. He was lying naked, sunbathing opposite the wych elm, whose foliage covered a broad expanse. It was 9 A.M., and Kizu had spent an hour in the light of the sun, now behind the wych elm's branches. He'd spread a bed cover on the terrace floor and was lying down, his legs spread wide toward the window. This was his new habit, a sentimental yet possibly effective way to warm the insides of his cancer- ravaged body.